Tag Archives: Terrorism

So the other day I was working in my office, minding my own business, when I received a text from my 16 year old son. It said, “So apparently George Washington was a terrorist…Screw world civ!” He later said his teacher believed Washington was amazing but, “If you look at the definition of terrorism, the American Revolutionary war would fall into that definition.”

I’m telling you. It is crap like that which makes me wish I was born with just middle fingers.

I text him a short list of the reasons why the American Revolution is nothing like terrorism. Later that night he said he was the only one in his class who defended Washington, and he believed, was the only one who had a brain in his head. He said he could tell the other students were sucking it up.

For fun I went to the source of all knowledge, Google, and typed “Define: Terrorist.” Google defines it as, “a person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims.” That obviously didn’t clear anything up so I asked for the definition of terrorism, which read, “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” I’m not sure how anyone with half a brain stem could lump George Washington, or any of the founding fathers into that category.

But then again, I’m not a liberal.

If I try to look at the history of the Revolutionary War through the paradigm of a whiny liberal – the word “paradigm” here is a fancy way of saying “the warped lens in which you view the world,” – (also, for my liberal friends, in the word paradigm, the “g” is silent) the ONLY incident that could vaguely have a terroristic line drawn in comparison is the Boston Tea party. But even that is a HUGE stretch.

If you’re like most American’s, everything you know about the Boston Tea party you probably learned, as a child, from watching “Mary Poppins.” Here is a recap:

Mr. Dawes Jr: In 1773, an official of this bank unwisely loaned a large sum of money to finance a shipment of tea to the American colonies. Do you know what happened?

George W. Banks: Yes, sir. Yes, I think I do. As the ship lay anchored in Boston Harbor, a party of the colonists dressed as red Indians boarded the vessel, behaved very rudely, and threw all the tea overboard. This made the tea unsuitable for drinking. Even for Americans.

“Behaved very rudely” and talking a seventeen year old to strap a bomb to himself and detonating it in a crowded market place are two entirely different things.

Most of the Founding Fathers condemned the Boston Tea party. George Washington disapproved. Benjamin Franklin demanded the “India Tea Company” be reimbursed for the destruction of the tea. Both American and British supporters of American independence, such as Edmund Burke, thought the Tea Party set back the cause.

Even the Founders who defended the raid had class. Paul Revere, who led the raid, exclusively to protest a new British tea tax, made sure to replace a broken lock on one of the ships. The British sailors from the ships confirmed, none of them were hurt, nothing was vandalized, and the protesters even swept the decks clean after the tea was destroyed.

Still, the raid was considered such an embarrassment to many of our founding fathers, it wasn’t celebrated for another 50 years.

Like I said…It’s a stretch.

“But Danny,” you whine, “what about George Washington?”

Washington was a hero and a patriot. The only negative title you could put on him that might stick is he was a traitor to the crown of England. As a young man he fought with distinction and honor in the Battle of Monongahela where he was so exposed to enemy fire his coat was pierced by four musket balls and he had two horses shot from underneath him. It’s hard to imagine the same person hiding behind a tree, detonating a bomb and then fleeing the crime scene.

One of the examples my son gave me of the “evidence” regarding Washington’s terrorism is when he crossed the Delaware and surprised, and defeated the Hessian forces. So I guess if an army attacks another army it terrorism?

Seriously?

The Declaration of the Cause and Necessity of Taking Up Arms states, “We, for ten years, incessantly and ineffectually besieged the Throne as supplicants; we reasoned, we remonstrated with Parliament, in the most mild and decent language.” For ten years. TEN. Then when the Founders did the truly revolutionary thing, three years after the Boston Tea Party, they signed the Declaration of Independence. In this document they describe with logic and reason, and in blindingly clear terms, their complaints against the Crown, the rights that had been infringed upon, their earlier attempts for resolution and an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world for independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”

Those are Jefferson’s words, but Washington embraced them whole-heartedly. Are they the words or beliefs of a terrorist?

Hardly.

LIFEZILLA: Where else can I go to spew my nonsensical diatribe and dumbassery? My wife and kids stopped listening to me YEARS ago!